Advances in Information Security and Privacy

With the recent pandemic emergency, many people are spending their days in smart working and have increased their use of digital resources for both work and entertainment. The result is that the amount of digital information handled online is dramatically increased, and we can observe a significant increase in the number of attacks, breaches, and hacks. This Special Issue aims to establish the state of the art in protecting information by mitigating information risks. This objective is reached by presenting both surveys on specific topics and original approaches and solutions to specific problems. In total, 16 papers have been published in this Special Issue

The InfoSec Handbook

Computer scienc

The InfoSec Handbook

Computer scienc

Exploring New Paradigms for Mobile Edge Computing

Edge computing has been rapidly growing in recent years to meet the surging demands from mobile apps and Internet of Things (IoT). Similar to the Cloud, edge computing provides computation, storage, data, and application services to the end-users. However, edge computing is usually deployed at the edge of the network, which can provide low-latency and high-bandwidth services for end devices. So far, edge computing is still not widely adopted. One significant challenge is that the edge computing environment is usually heterogeneous, involving various operating systems and platforms, which complicates app development and maintenance. in this dissertation, we explore to combine edge computing with virtualization techniques to provide a homogeneous environment, where edge nodes and end devices run exactly the same operating system. We develop three systems based on the homogeneous edge computing environment to improve the security and usability of end-device applications. First, we introduce vTrust, a new mobile Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which offloads the general execution and storage of a mobile app to a nearby edge node and secures the I/O between the edge node and the mobile device with the aid of a trusted hypervisor on the mobile device. Specifically, vTrust establishes an encrypted I/O channel between the local hypervisor and the edge node, such that any sensitive data flowing through the hosted mobile OS is encrypted. Second, we present MobiPlay, a record-and-replay tool for mobile app testing. By collaborating a mobile phone with an edge node, MobiPlay can effectively record and replay all types of input data on the mobile phone without modifying the mobile operating system. to do so, MobiPlay runs the to-be-tested application on the edge node under exactly the same environment as the mobile device and allows the tester to operate the application on a mobile device. Last, we propose vRent, a new mechanism to leverage smartphone resources as edge node based on Xen virtualization and MiniOS. vRent aims to mitigate the shortage of available edge nodes. vRent enforces isolation and security by making the users\u27 android OSes as Guest OSes and rents the resources to a third-party in the form of MiniOSes

Operating system support for warehouse-scale computing

Modern applications are increasingly backed by large-scale data centres. Systems software in these data centre environments, however, faces substantial challenges: the lack of uniform resource abstractions makes sharing and resource management inefficient, infrastructure software lacks end-to-end access control mechanisms, and work placement ignores the effects of hardware heterogeneity and workload interference. In this dissertation, I argue that uniform, clean-slate operating system (OS) abstractions designed to support distributed systems can make data centres more efficient and secure. I present a novel distributed operating system for data centres, focusing on two OS components: the abstractions for resource naming, management and protection, and the scheduling of work to compute resources. First, I introduce a reference model for a decentralised, distributed data centre OS, based on pervasive distributed objects and inspired by concepts in classic 1980s distributed OSes. Translucent abstractions free users from having to understand implementation details, but enable introspection for performance optimisation. Fine-grained access control is supported by combining storable, communicable identifier capabilities, and context-dependent, ephemeral handle capabilities. Finally, multi-phase I/O requests implement optimistically concurrent access to objects while supporting diverse application-level consistency policies. Second, I present the DIOS operating system, an implementation of my model as an extension to Linux. The DIOS system call API is centred around distributed objects, globally resolvable names, and translucent references that carry context-sensitive object meta-data. I illustrate how these concepts support distributed applications, and evaluate the performance of DIOS in microbenchmarks and a data-intensive MapReduce application. I find that it offers improved, finegrained isolation of resources, while permitting flexible sharing. Third, I present the Firmament cluster scheduler, which generalises prior work on scheduling via minimum-cost flow optimisation. Firmament can flexibly express many scheduling policies using pluggable cost models; it makes high-quality placement decisions based on fine-grained information about tasks and resources; and it scales the flow-based scheduling approach to very large clusters. In two case studies, I show that Firmament supports policies that reduce colocation interference between tasks and that it successfully exploits flexibility in the workload to improve the energy efficiency of a heterogeneous cluster. Moreover, my evaluation shows that Firmament scales the minimum-cost flow optimisation to clusters of tens of thousands of machines while still making sub-second placement decisions.St John's College Supplementary Emolument Fund DARP

WORLD WAR III A TECHNO ECONOMIC INTROSPECTION

Starting from February 2007 world market is facing what we call enantiodromia. The indices are correcting. It is not known whether this is the final correction but there is no doubt that the bubble has burst and air out of it is gushing out slowly (fast on an extended time frame). The biggest question faced by the world now is whether the bursting of the bubble will bring in a deflationary environment as seeds of deflation are seen already germinating very much within the core of rampant inflation envisaged everywhere. ‘Ke sera sera’ whatever will be, will be, but is it not important to investigate as to how this economic menace could happen unnoticed by all? Was there any game plan conceived by a few nations to make best use of the last bit of the Grand Supercycle that began around 1789? Is it not important to rescan flaws remaining within the very system of capital flow/accumulation and control? The science of war, too, has undergone a sea of change. It is no more a concept of battle of arms restricted to a specific war field. With the advent of globalization the boundaries between countries have diluted. The new warfare recognizes no geographical boundaries. It is clash of finance versus finance with ultimate objective remaining the same: worldwide destruction and impoverishment of the rest of the world. Terrorist activities too come within the ambit of this new framework of warfare that is nothing but deployment of combinations. This is return of World War again. Whether we accept or not, truth remains, World War III is going on, possibly since the year 1982. Having notices the cancer growing underneath the beautiful skin of economic boom one and a half year back, we walked up to several publishers and a renowned university in India to help us send across the message to the millions across the world. Context of the book trashing the economic situation then, made all skeptical to go ahead and publish the same. This prompted me to put this book up in the air as an e-book in an effort to bring this into the eye of the millions that surf the net everyday. Which too did not fair well, and before I could do anything to bring this subject to the eyes of the common man, the debacle occurred. Had it been published at the right time, thousands, if not millions that lost heavily in the economic crash, may have had a way to save something in the landslide. However, as the book sites, there is a lot remaining to happen. Furthermore, the same can be used to avoid similar instances in future